SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1365 He's Paid $250k to Travel Influencers on Behalf of Brands
20 Apr 2019
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of Cooperatize and how does it operate?
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Chapter 2: How does Cooperatize generate revenue from its marketplace?
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If success came with an instruction manual, this book would be it. We'll be stocking up and handing these out as Christmas gifts to all my friends and colleagues. If I could give this book a six-star review, I would. From James, James, thank you. All you that listen to the podcast, thank you so much. SaaS founders are loving the book.
Chapter 3: What role do influencers play in Cooperatize's business model?
Go grab an Audible version right now at capitalistbook.com. building a great marketplace in a very hot space. But I don't really think anyone has really cracked the model on kind of influencer marketing, especially in a SaaS, you know, going from marketplace to a SaaS company. So he's in it. He's playing the game launched in 2014.
Him and his co-founder put in called $125,000, $130,000 between the both of them. They're doing call it $10,000, $20,000 per month right now in terms of SaaS product revenue. Over the past 12 months, they've put about a quarter of a million bucks through their kind of platform connecting brands with influencers, of which they take about 20%. So there's $50,000 in revenue there as well.
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Chapter 4: What is the difference between Cooperatize's SaaS and transaction revenue models?
Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company. It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers.
With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone.
Chapter 5: How has the influencer marketing landscape evolved since Cooperatize's inception?
My guest today is Roger Wu. He's the co-founder of Co-Operatize, a marketplace connecting brands with bloggers. Before that, he started an e-commerce site, giftfinder.com, and interactive video software, clickable.tv. He was on the founding team of Bloomberg Law and started his career on Wall Street. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Management and Technology Platform.
Roger, are you ready to take us to the top? I am. Hello, everybody. All right. Tell us about the company.
Chapter 6: What strategies does Cooperatize use to measure the success of influencer campaigns?
What do you guys do and how do you make money? So we operate a marketplace that connects different brands with bloggers, as you mentioned. We're a marketplace, so we take a transaction fee from each transaction that goes to the marketplace. Our primary focus is in the travel space, but the exciting thing about travel is that
Everybody writes about travel, whether you're a fitness blogger, you're a food blogger, or you're a family blogger. So a lot of our customers cut across all different sectors, and a lot of our other customers can tap that travel blogger marketplace. And Roger, just to be clear, so there's no SaaS model here. It's pure marketplace. Correct. Okay.
Chapter 7: What challenges does Cooperatize face in the influencer marketing space?
So walk me through, like, give me an example of what a cut might look like. So I'm a blogger. I travel. I write about how I use my chase card. When I travel, you connect me with chase. They pay me a grand a month. What do you take? Correct. So depending on, depending on the overall spend with chase, we take anywhere from 10 to 25%. Okay.
Chapter 8: What insights does Roger Wu share about the future of influencer marketing?
Um, I do take that back. We do have a SaaS model where you can subscribe to our platform because a lot of our travel brands want to just offer trips and freebies. So you can subscribe to the platform and just use it that way. And that way there's no money that goes through the system. The blogger is paying the SaaS fee or the company? The companies are paying the SaaS fee.
So Chase would pay $500 a month. They have access to all the bloggers and they can say, hey, I want you to come to this event in this city. And they can just do that on a monthly basis. And why would the blogger do that if they're not getting paid anything from Chase? Because they might get some kind of perk. They show up at a cool event.
A lot of our bloggers, it's really the long-tail distribution. We call it micro-influencers. So these are people that have quote-unquote regular jobs, but they have a pretty nice following on social media, but they're not Kim Kardashian yet. And so they're not able to necessarily... make this a full living, but they want to get different perks, different benefits from their following. Okay.
And what percentage of your revenue is SaaS based versus just pure transaction revenue? So we started the SaaS model, gosh, maybe like six months ago or so, and just getting started less than 5% as of now. Okay. So what are we talking like 10, 20 grand a month right now coming from SaaS? About that. Yeah. Okay. Got it. So really market, but now why complicate your model? Why introduce SaaS at all?
SaaS is a great way to kind of smooth out what you're going to be getting just from running a business perspective. We see a big bump in spends at the end of every fiscal. So there's a lot of use it or lose it kind of budgets. So June's and December's, we see big bumps. And with SaaS, it's just easier to predict, easier to kind of run a business than having these big spikes throughout the year.
Have you raised capital or bootstrapped? So just from my, my business partner, myself, we put in initial money into the business and you know, it's me, him, and we have two other employees. All right. I want to know how, how, how in are you guys? How much have you put in? We've put in about 125. Each or total? Total. Total. Okay, good.
And now walk me through, kind of put this on a timeline for me. When did you launch the company? We incorporated about 2013, but incorporation doesn't really mean much. We're sitting there trying to figure out how to make this work. I would say our current model started... end of 14, beginning of 15. That's where we started seeing traction in the, in the travel space.
We started understanding how things work, you know, how to speak the language to different brands. Um, and, and things just kind of took off from there where initially we were doing everything manually and then we looked for patterns to figure out, okay, how do we, how do we, uh, uh, productize this as opposed to just using spreadsheets and interns.
So in the last 12 months, how much money has gone through your system? Uh, in the last 12 months, about a quarter million dollars, give or take. Okay. So 250,000, you know, going through the platform and now you just said you take anywhere between like 10 and 20% of that. So that means you take call it 50, maybe thousand there plus another revenue stream.
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